Afternoon Reading: Jobs, Goldman & The Lobster Roll

By Dimitra DeFotis

National Library of Sweden

The octopus lobster, from a 1572 map.

On a blissful summer Friday, what could be better than tales of lobster salad, big banks and Hamptons real estate?

With today’s weak jobs data as a backdrop, “culture butler” Jesse Kornbluth weaves a rather delicious tale that is billed as “a fanstasy of life among the interns at the world’s most famous investment bank” in the NewYorkSocialDiary.com article email. It stars a decidedly nameless college kid who parlays a no-work summer hanging at his family’s Hamptons home into a lucrative vacation peddling lobster salad for $125 per pound. This turns up a few business cards, and summer work at Goldman Sachs (GS) on some aluminum projects (the warehousing of which is the subject of scrutiny outlined by the New York Timeshere). The author goes on to tie in real estate owned by nervous hedge fund families in posh beach communities on Long Island’s east end.

As for the other 99%, Dan Alpert, a managing partner at New York investment bank Westwood Capital, says “we have become a nation of hamburger flippers.” More of his take on the new sick economy, and “the Hamburger Flipper, the Barmaid, the Temp, the Garbage Man, and the Walmart ‘Associate,’ ” in this Century Foundation blog post and in Yahoo video on jobs and the economy.

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